A comment on the Republican attitude toward compromise and cooperation: don’t do it

John Wright (Rural VA) said he had become so frustrated with 

the mainstream media that he consumes only pro-Trump programming

Credit...

The Republican attitude in congress toward bipartisan compromise and cooperation is simple: don’t do it. The Washington Post writes in an article, GOP erupts over its House members bailing out Biden:

On Friday, 13 House Republicans delivered the decisive votes to rescue a key part of President Biden’s agenda — an agenda endangered by those in his own party.

But in the end it wasn’t really those progressives who provided the key votes, but rather the 13 Republicans. The final vote count was 228 to 206, meaning if no Republicans had voted for the bill, it wouldn’t have passed.

And some Republicans are predictably furious — with undersold questions about House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) future leadership of the party potentially in the offing.

“I can’t believe Republicans just gave the Democrats their socialism bill,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said.

“That 13 House Republicans provided the votes needed to pass this is absurd,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) said.

Others threatened before the vote to target or launch primaries against the defectors in their midst.

“Vote for this infrastructure bill and I will primary the hell out of you,” Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) said shortly before the vote.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), in her typically understated fashion, warned last week that any Republican who voted for the bill would be “a traitor to our party, a traitor to their voters and a traitor to our donors.” After the vote, she accused the 13 of having voted to “pass Joe Biden’s Communist takeover of America” and tweeted the phone numbers to their congressional offices (while for some reason only listing 12 of the 13).

While McCarthy previously kept his powder dry on whipping against the bill, he ultimately pushed for his members to vote against it. As recently as last week, McCarthy said, “I don’t expect few, if any, to vote for it, if it comes to the floor today.” In another interview, he was asked about the infrastructure bill and said, “It will fail.” 

The National Review summed it up accordingly: “Disgraceful House Republicans Rescue Biden’s Flailing Agenda”:

    … [Thirteen] Republicans swooped in to rescue Pelosi, provide Biden with the biggest victory of his presidency, and put the rest of his reckless agenda on a glide path to passage in the House. 

    This is a substantively bad decision that is political malpractice. It represents a betrayal.

    

    Politically, it’s unclear what Republicans are thinking. Biden entered this week reeling from a devastating rebuke of his presidency by voters in areas of the country thought to be reliably Democratic. He headed into the 2022 election year a wounded animal, and Republicans stood to make major gains. Now, they tossed him a life raft and allowed him to put bipartisan gloss on his radical agenda. 

    Every Republican who voted for this monstrosity who is not already retiring should be primaried and defeated by candidates who will actually resist the Left-wing agenda. Those who are retiring should be shamed for the rest of their lives. It also is not too soon to be asking whether Representative Kevin McCarthy should be ousted from leadership for his inability to keep his caucus together on such a crucial vote.  

And that last one is a key point here. The bill included lots of popular projects and, in another era, probably would’ve gotten significantly more GOP votes. But we live in this era, in which delivering a political win for the other side — however popular the bill and however much your constituents might want it — is seen as apostasy. The demand in the GOP for such devotion to the party line and its election prospects is even greater than on the other side.

Obviously, most FRP (fascist Republican Party) politicians have no interest in compromise or cooperation with congressional Democrats. They see socialism and treason in the Republican House vote, including treason to Republican donors. So does the FRP propaganda Leviathan, which called the vote a betrayal in support of a radical agenda. Those House Republicans are probably going to face a ferocious RINO hunt in the 2022 primary election. If the ex-president weighs in, they could lose their House seats. The situation for Democrats in rural areas seems to be bad and may be getting worse.[1]

Who are the radicals here?

One definition of radical is that it is advocacy of policies that a majority does not want. Another definition in political science terminology is that radicalism is the belief that society needs to be changed, and that these changes are only possible through revolutionary means. For the last few years, the FRP has been consistently calling Democratic Party policy goals radical left or socialist, neither of which is true. Most rank and file Republicans appear to believe those lies. Opinion polling indicates that most major Democratic policies have majority American public support. Some poll data indicates that most Americans support this infrastructure bill (somewhat higher support in this poll). It is likely that public support would be higher if FRP elite propaganda had not poisoned it as socialism or leftist radicalism in the minds of many rank and file Republicans, where opposition tends to be strong.  

Questions: 

1. There were some republican votes in the Senate for the bill, so was that a sign of FRP bipartisan cooperation, or was it an act dictated by party politics with no real cooperation appetite, regardless of what the bill would do for the American people or the country generally? In other words, was the Senate vote an illusion of bipartisanship more than actual good will bipartisanship? The same can be asked of the 13 House Republicans who voted for the bill.

2. Despite FRP propaganda characterizing the bipartisan infrastructure bill as radical left or socialist, will at least a modest number of average Americans change their minds once they start to feel some benefits flowing from new infrastructure spending? Is this bill radical, assuming most Americans oppose it? Does it matter if some public opposition is mostly based on false characterizations of the bill by the FRP propaganda Leviathan?

3. Is this significant evidence that the FRP elites, including big financial backers and congressional politicians, usually places loyalty to the party above the loyalty to truth, public opinion or the public interest?

Footnote:

1. A New York Times article, Democrats Thought They Bottomed Out in Rural, White America. It Wasn’t the Bottom., suggests the urban-rural divide is not something Democrats have an answer to and it is part of their nationwide weakness.

Republicans ran up the margins in rural Virginia counties, the latest sign that Democrats, as one lawmaker put it, “continue to tank in small-town America.” 

Mr. Youngkin not only won less populated areas by record margins — he was outpacing former President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 showing in even the reddest counties, including by six percentage points in Bath County — but he also successfully rolled back Democratic gains in the bedroom communities outside Washington and Richmond, where many college-educated white voters had rejected Republicanism under Mr. Trump. 

The twin results raise a foreboding possibility for Democrats: that the party had simply leased the suburbs in the Trump era, while Republicans may have bought and now own even more of rural America.

Republicans have never had a demographic stronghold as reliable as Black voters have been for Democrats, a group that delivers as many as nine out of 10 votes for the party. But some Democratic leaders are now sounding the alarm: What if rural, white voters — of which there are many — start voting that reliably Republican?